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John Howard's foreign aid package not enough : Comments
By Nick Coatsworth, published 20/9/2005Nicholas Coatsworth says that John Howard's approach to foreign aid is not generous enough.
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While we in socially-progressive Australia seem to have difficulties in achieving adequacy of education, training, and health care for our children, with an average of 1.7 children per woman, how reasonable were Coatsworth's hopes for the Congo? A place where each of its women, the prime providers for children, has to stretch her inadequate resources over four times the number that are dependent upon her better-served Australian counterpart.
What hope, when almost half of the population are below, or just reaching, 15 - about the age of puberty? How can the administration of such a country arrange adequate governance with such a proportion of dependents, whether they are the mothers or the children themselves? How, when they are demonstrably failing to cope presently, might they be expected to cope better while the present mix of population is unlikely to rapidly change; nor being given assistance to change, or minimise increase; while they are on target to double in just one more generation?
How blind, a putative Master of International Public Health with a humanitarian focus, to author an article on such a distressing subject - yet fail to give any mention to the factor of population pressure and its continuing increase. No acknowledgement at all of its recognition by the international conference in Cairo in 1994, nor the massive resiling from responsibilities taken on there: Responsibilities to assist developing nations to contain their own populations within numbers for which they could provide.
Was it blindness, or some perverse pleasure in ensuring a continuance of need for the practice of triage?